Sourcefire announced its Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) which combines IPS threat prevention, integrated application control and firewall capabilities in a high-performance security appliance.

By combining NGIPS and NGFW, Sourcefire has created an enterprise firewall solution with enterprise visibility, adaptive security and threat protection.

"Threats continue to advance, and network security defenses must evolve to become effective against advanced targeted threats. Enterprises should require vendors to add next-generation intrusion prevention features to network security products," said Greg Young, research vice president, Gartner. "Mainstream enterprises over time will refresh existing next-generation firewall deployments with future versions with next-generation network IPS capabilities."

Sourcefire is delivering a context-aware and adaptive NGFW solution to offer its customers network protection and control without compromise. The Sourcefire NGFW provides this increased protection by combining the ability to identify and provide granular control for more than 1,000 applications with visibility, intelligent automation and threat prevention effectiveness. These capabilities are all backed by the Sourcefire Vulnerability Research Team (VRT) and the company’s collective security intelligence.

Sourcefire leverages a single-pass engine that delivers deep inspection while maintaining peak performance. The FirePOWER platform can be configured at the customer’s discretion as an NGIPS, an NGIPS with application control or an NGFW, providing the customer ultimate flexibility to deploy appliances to match their infrastructure needs and scale over time.

Using its patented FireSIGHT technology, Sourcefire delivers increased visibility into applications, users, content, hosts, attacks, vulnerabilities, behavior and changes in a user’s environment. It then correlates this information with user identity and reputation intelligence to assess risks and threat impact to make more precise enforcement decisions.

The Sourcefire Next-Generation Firewall employs intelligent security automation to increase the agility of protection efforts that can keep pace with constantly changing environments. This is accomplished by the Sourcefire NGFW through comprehensive contextual awareness and collective threat intelligence that result in more meaningful policy recommendations and automated adjustments to a customer’s defense in real time

It also allows security teams to optimize remediation efforts by reducing actionable alerts and filtering out events that do not affect the particular user’s environment.